Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Below is a cutdown of the some of the animation they did for a live launch event that was streamed from the Hammerstein Ballroom in NYC to millions of fans around the world.

They were also kind of enough to give a little QnA on the making of! ( see below)

SM: awesome job.. about how long did you have to do all the shots? and how many artists ?

JD: Thanks! Since most of the animation had to be based on the interviews, we had about a week of R+D, and only about 2-3 weeks to create 4.5 minutes of animation. It was a tough job to staff, since we didn't know exactly what we were going to be animating when we started booking people. We ended up with a team of 13 artists, pretty evenly split between 3D, motion graphics and design/illustration. My wife Lucy, who works in childrens books, even came in for a few days to knock out some character designs.

SM: how much design did you get to do of the piece? characters? places ? etc

JD: We worked closely with Timothy Smith, an Art Director at Sony, whose personal illustration style we used as a launch point. We then generated concepts and artwork in-house. SW: We would get the interview footage and concepts from Sony, and then send them our storyboards and designs to connect all the different ideas.

SM: can you explain a little about the process? how much was hand drawn and then animated as flat art vs 3d that had shaders on it? JD: We ended up using a really wide range of approaches, depending on the needs of each shot. We were aiming for a mixed-media look. All of the characters are 2d art, but some of them were rigged and animated in maya, while others were done in After FX. The F1 car, the biplane and some other elements were animated in 3d, and rendered in a few passes that were filtered, offset and comped in After Fx.

SM:anything special you can share about the uncrumpling of the paper? ( rigs/anm/modeling? )

JD: We considered creating the crumple effect in 3D, but ended up going the traditional stop motion route. We actually printed out each element, and shot them crumpling in reverse with a DSLR on our coffee table.SW: It was one of the more fun effects in the spot.

SM:There are a lot of cool transitions for each sequence, anything special you can tell us about they way they were done?

JD: Since we had such a diverse team, we ended up doing some of the voxel-based transitions in ICE, and used a mix of 2D and 3D particles for the symbol-based transitions.

SM:do you find it sad that the guy walking down the street looking at his phone, missed out on missing the girl of his dreams cause they are both looking down at their phones?

SW: We had a lot of fun with that sequence. Aside from locking down the key elements like the hero guy, we gave the artist a lot of creative freedom to populate the background extras. There's even a cat playing with a Sony tablet on the coffee table. Who knows if he actually missed out on the girl, maybe they met up on their Sony device and played some Street Fighter against each other.

SM:did you get a free PS4 out of the job?

JD: Not yet, but if it proves too difficult to get our hands on a launch-day PS4, we may try to call in a favor!
SM: thanks for the interview, you guys ROCK!

Jonathan Dorfman and Szymon Weglarski launched their digital animation/VFX company, HiFi 3D, in 2010 to provide high-end animation production services for a variety of media, from commercials to feature films. They work in a wide range of styles from heavily stylized to realistic. Their work on HBO's "Boardwalk Empire" recently won an Emmy for “Outstanding Special Visual Effects" and a VES award for "Outstanding Models in a Broadcast Program or Commercial"

Szymon Weglarski's specialties are photo-real 3d work and live-action integration. While working at some of the top commercial effects houses, his work has appeared in a wide range of projects, from an award-winning Super Bowl spot for FedEx, another high profile Super Bowl spot for Bridgestone, the Geico Gecko ad series and long form animation spots for Coca Cola. Other notable clients include Michelin, M&M's, Dodge, and Nissan.

Jonathan Dorfman is an Emmy award-winning vfx artist. He has worked with many of the top commercial effects houses in New York, creating a wide variety of work for clients such as Coca Cola, HBO, MTV, IBM, Rockstar Games, Microsoft, HP, Verizon and AT&T.

So there have been tons of rumors flying around on the future of Naiad since it was acquired by autodesk, and what exactly is bi-frost

A particular 3dsMax forum has been going crazy over what was shown at the Autodesk Users Group meeting in Anneheim at Siggraph 2013, and the lack of 3dsMax updates.. I wasn't there , but apparently there was a lot of Maya shown. Also a sneak peak at bi-frost was shown, which is believed to be the next generation of what naiad is to become.

I'm under NDA so I can't share anything, but I can tell you, that I also don't know anything.

the most reliable comment found so far on the 3dsMax forum has actually come from one of the founders of naiad Marcus Nordenstam.

For now, I think the best thing to do is give them a little air to breathe, and hopefully they will get something out soon to get everyone excited over.

I'm excited to see what comes out.. but I'm not going to hold my breath just yet.

by Marcus Nordenstam - July 26, 2013 9:57 pm
Hello everyone,
It seems many people are arriving at incorrect conclusions in regards to Naiad and Bifrost, and how they relate to Maya and Max.
Naiad was a standalone, node-based software that did fluid simulation (liquids in particular). You had to use a separate app (Naiad Studio) to make Naiad graphs, and then export the sim output into Max.
“Project Bifrost” (which is a CODE-name, btw, not necessarily the actual product name) is also a standalone, more general, node-based software that will do fluid-simulation – and much more, in time.
Bifrost does not know about Maya. There isn’t a single line of code in Bifrost that directly uses the Maya API. Maya, on the other hand, can be made to know about Bifrost. That’s how we, as a test, integrated Bifrost into Maya. It follows that Bifrost could easily be integrated into other DCCs, be made as a standalone product, ported to the iPad – you name it. One of the many strengths of the Bifrost architecture lies in the fact that it’s “product agnostic” and that it can “go anywhere”.
What we showed at the Autodesk User Group last week was the results of our experimental Maya integration. We have to focus on one product and do it right, and the decision was to go with Maya. I understand that users of other products such as Max may feel disappointed, but before you condemn Autdoesk to the 7th circle of hell you should take note of two things:
1. Autodesk has NOT said that Maya is the only DCC that will ever run Bifrost. Just because Maya was chosen does not mean it won’t appear elsewhere.
2. Even if Maya, in the end, is the only DCC to allow Bifrost FX authoring, is that really all that different from Naiad Studio? Nobody was complaining that you had to use Naiad Studio to author Naiad graphs, then export the sim output into your favorite DCC, and go from there? How would this be vastly different? Maya can, in the worst case, be viewed as a “better” Naiad Studio. Use Maya for making your Bifrost FX graphs – then export the sim results into Max and go from there. This is what you did with Naiad Studio + Max, and you can do it with Maya + Max.
I understand your frustrations, but I wanted to give you guys a bit of perspective :-)
Best wishes,
Marcus Nordenstam
Any claims that “Bifrost is part of Maya” are false claims.

For those of you that don't know http://www.pointpusher.com/ or ( the artist formerly known as Danny Williams) , he is an amazing talent and excellent teacher . Prior to leaving the east coast for Dream Works, he used to teach at SVA and work for BlueSky Studios.

He has done several classes for visualarium and online and is always eager to learn more and discuss and teach as well !

Friday, July 19, 2013

Just posting some of the updates that have recently come along with ART from Anzovin

for those of you that missed it, Raf Anzovin and his team have been developing a new paradigm in tools for rigging in maya.
Rather than using Bones, the ART tools use a bone spline. Not only does this help out tremendously with giving artists the ability to stretch , bend, and twist their joints nicely, it adds a host of functionality in terms of volume preservation, being able to add additional controls at any place and even slide them, and a built in Pose Space Deformer System.

Wednesday, July 10, 2013

I've only played a little with MASH but I liked what I could see so far.. It looks like they've added a little bit more functionality, and stability in the next release.
and with that comes a new price £89.99

if you haven't played with it, I highly recommend checking out the tutorials and downloading the trial version. ( its not ice for maya, but it does do a lot of cool procedurally node based setups)

mash 2.0 highlight demo reel

some of the new Features in Mash 2.1

Flight node

math node

initial state node

multi curve node now allows for multiple curves

random node min max sliders added

offset node now features "closest point on mesh"

distribute node features more options

mute node

orient node

ability to delete and maintain connections on any mash node

faster as its not 100% C++ based

supports maya instancer

menu based setup vs shelf button for simplified use

extensive bug fixing

there are also a number of updates and bug fixes all listed on the Mainframe site: